Jeff Novitzki was an IRS agent. Not an avenging angel sent from above, nor an earthly crusader for all that is good and pure in America, but a bureaucrat. Somewhere along the way he got it into his mind that it was his job and his job alone (and his only job) to eradicate the peril of steroids in sports. He's with the FDA now, but he continues his myopic, monomaniacal quest to bring down the users.

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With today's mistrial in the Roger Clemens case, let's take a look at some of Novitzki's targets and what came of the copious amounts of man-hours and taxpayer money that went into securing justice.

In summary, Jeff Novitzky is not very good at punishing people for using steroids, but he's great at punishing people for saying they didn't use them.

In Les Miserables, the similarly obsessed Javert could not reconcile the fact that laws and morals were not one and the same. He removed himself from the case (permanently) and the entire menace disappeared — it had never been an actual menace beyond what the investigator made it.